Quote of the Day

There is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.

-- Edward Elgar

Quote of the Day

Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness.  It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love.  The only cure for grief is to grieve.

-- Earl Grollman

Quote of the Day

Grief is not a sign of weakness; it's a sign of love.  It's the price we pay for having deeply connected to someone or something.

-- Dr. Thema Bryant

Quote of the Day

My songs are like my journals.  And when other people relate to the music, I'm like, "Oh, thank God I'm not alone."

-- Laufey

Quote of the Day

I see your life as already artful, waiting,

just waiting and ready for you to make it art.

-- Toni Morrison

Quote of the Day

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.  I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.  Let them become the photograph on the table.  Let them become the name on the trust accounts.  Let go of them in the water.  Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.  In fact the apprehension that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my every day seemed today on Lexington Avenue so distinct a betrayal that I lost all sense of oncoming traffic.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 225-226

Quote of the Day

Dolphins, I learned from J. William Worden of the Harvard Child Bereavement Study at Massachusetts General Hospital, had been observed refusing to eat after the death of a mate.  Geese had been observed reacting to such a death by flying and calling, searching until they themselves became disoriented and lost.  Human beings, I read but did not need to learn, showed similar patterns of response.  They searched.  They stopped eating.  They forgot to breathe.  They grew faint from lowered oxygen, they clogged their sinuses with unshed tears and ended up in otolaryngologists' offices with obscure ear infections.  They lost concentration.  "After a year I could read headlines," I was told by a friend whose husband had died three years before.  They lost cognitive ability on all scales.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 46-47

Quote of the Day

When I checked the piece for publication I was startled and unsettled by how many mistakes I had made: simple errors of transcription, names and dates wrong.  I told myself that this was temporary, part of the mobilization problem, further evidence of those cognitive deficits that came with either stress or grief, but I remained unsettled.  Would I ever be right again?  Could I ever again trust myself not to be wrong?

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 200

Quote of the Day

A doctor to whom I mentioned (that I had inadvertently given the hospital an old address) shrugged, as if I had told him a familiar story.  Either he said that such"cognitive deficits" could be associated with stress or he said that such cognitive deficits could be associated with grief.  It was a mark of those cognitive deficits that within seconds after he said it I had no idea which he had said.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 200

Quote of the Day

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him.  This impulse did not end with his death.  What ended was the possibility of response.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 194

Quote of the Day

... consider those dolphins who refuse to eat after the death of a mate.  Consider those geese who search for the lost mate until they themselves become disoriented and die.  In fact the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 193

Quote of the Day

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

-- Philippe Aries

Quote of the Day

People in grief think a great deal about self-pity.  We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it.  We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as "dwelling on it."  We understand the aversion most of us have to "dwelling on it."  Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 192